* * *
—
THE COUNTRY looked brown and indistinct beneath her plane. She saw wide swaths of geography but could not identify what it was. Anonymous rivers snaked and glistened. She stared at Lake Erie and thought of wind. The rinky-dink airport was touching. It was supposed to have been a United hub, but that hadn’t worked out, and now a new terminal extension sat empty. The star-crossed city of her birth.
It had been four years since she’d been back to Ohio, almost the entirety of Shiva’s life. The little house had aged even faster than her parents. The roof was at a loss for shingles; the waterlogged stucco was turning into an exhibit of undiscovered continents. Did Seema still have money to throw at the problem? Even if the SEC came a-knocking? After marrying Barry, she toyed with the idea of buying her parents a new house, somewhere in University Heights, because her mother would never leave her beloved Indian community, maybe a McMansion closer to the Legacy Village mall. But she disliked the idea of Barry’s money vanishing her own childhood, this tiny House of Accomplishments. They had never been poor growing up; their neighborhood had had that rare idyllic midwestern middle-class vibe, two-thousand-square-foot capes blustering through the early autumn wind, two Chryslers by every curb. Standing in front of her parents’ house, she thought of her own sleek apartment, and Luis and Julianna’s apartment, and all the town houses her husband’s friends inhabited, and realized that maybe she had never really understood money. Somewhere along the line it popped out like a jack-in-the-box, and she lacked the finesse to cram it back in.
Her mother was angry that she had not brought Shiva. “Where’s our genius baby boy?” she asked even as she was hugging her daughter tight. “How could you visit without him?”
Her father’s feet slapped down the stairs in the Havaianas she had brought back from a trip to Rio. He was wearing a This Side of Capital vest. “Take that off!” her mother screamed at him. “Don’t you know she’s finished with Barry?”
Her father looked confused, but at the same time ecstatic that his daughter had come. “Hut!” he said. “We don’t know anything. Young people fight.”
Seema smiled. “I came for your ‘huts,’ Daddy.” Her father smiled and looked away, overwhelmed by his love.
“She married an old man!” her mother said, never letting go of a line of attack. “Always a mistake!” Her father sighed and took off the vest. When he sat down he had to elevate his leg on a footstool because of a recent knee injury. They were in their early sixties. Her mother was fearsome in her thick-bellied furor, but her father was shrinking into the skinny nineteen-year-old she had seen in black-and-white photos, smiling so tenderly, goofily, in his prized oxford shirt brought over from Bombay, even as the seventies dawned around him.
They spent a good portion of the day making sambar and idlis in the kitchen, traditional breakfast foods that Seema and her parents loved to have for dinner, her mother talking about divorce and “the future,” like it was an item for purchase over at Legacy Village. While her mother was distracted by the lentils, Seema snuck away to be with her father, who was sitting in the living room humming slokas and reading the Economist and his science journals. She sat down across from him on the slightly too-leathery immigrant couch. “I missed you,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me about your knee?”
“Your sister’s the doctor,” her father said. His pride in his daughters was almost hilarious to behold, like a summer hose spraying in all directions. Seema knew what he would say next. “One doctor, one lawyer. I’m covered for life.”
“So you talked to Shilpa about your knee.”
Her father cringed, the pink of his gums exposed. “She’s so busy over there in Nepal.”
“So then you’re not exactly ‘covered for life.’ ”
“It’s just a simple meniscus tear. Dr. Pinchas said, ‘Lay off it for a while,’ and to use the footstool. He went to Case Western, almost as good as Shilpa’s Vanderbilt. I looked up the rankings. They’re both in the top hundred for primary care and in the top twenty-five for research.” Case Western was the alma mater of both of her parents, and they were relentless boosters.
“I was actually thinking maybe I could go back to work,” Seema said, quickly scanning her phone for the Mayo Clinic’s page on meniscus tears, which were apparently painful and debilitating and often afflicted much younger, sportier people, then sending Shilpa an angry e-mail to check in on her family right fucking now.
Her father sat up, excited, his knee creaking. “Legal work?”
Seema nodded. She thought of Luis’s parting words to her about her lack of employment. She couldn’t believe how happy she had made her father by merely mentioning the word “work.” Even if it was a lie. She thought of all the other well-credentialed hedge-fund wives explaining, in unison, why they had left their jobs: My income was pretty good, but given Larry/Joey/Barry/Sung Min’s marginal tax rate, why bother? My salary wouldn’t even pay for the help.
“Wonderful!” her father said. “Oh, there’s so much you can do. You just took a little break to have your son. Do you know I still subscribe to the National Law Journal and the New York Law Journal? Just in case.”
Seema thought she was going to cry. He probably understood those journals better than she could at this point. Her father looked like a delicate little slice of clam within the shell of the oversize sofa.
Her mother thundered in in her apron, the scent of ginger clinging to the thickness of her plaited hair. “Why won’t you help me, Seema?” she shouted. “You’re acting like a guest in your own house!”
“I’m talking to appa,” she said.
“Plenty of time to talk to him. You should call him on the phone. He doesn’t do anything, you don’t do anything. You’re perfect for each other. Help me with the idlis!”
“Amma!”
“Ushuru vaangadhey!” her mother shouted. A Tamil saying she and Shilpa had heard every day growing up. Don’t take the life out of me.
Seema trudged into the kitchen. Her mother had consigned her to poking the holes of the stainless-steel idli contraption with a toothpick to get the steamed batter out. The idlis had cooked up perfectly soft, fluffy, and slightly sour from the fermentation. How did her mother cook so well, while Seema had difficulties getting beyond sambar rice 101? How did her parents live so simply in this tiny house, happily lost between Ohio and the world they were born to? They were so mismatched, and yet they made it work. In old age, their interests bent toward each other’s like never before. Gardening, complaining, looking things up on the Internet. Not that Seema hadn’t tried with Barry’s watches, ordering all those magazines about goddamned fluted bezels and floating tourbillons, attending the industry shitshow that was Baselworld every year until Shiva’s diagnosis.
“You have to send me pictures of Shiva every day,” her mother was saying as she sliced up a row of shallots. “Otherwise you’re stabbing me in the heart. And what was all that on the phone about him being sick? You take your son to the hospital, I’m the first person you call. And then I’m on the next plane.”
Seema thought “on the next plane” sounded like something glamorous a person might have said back when her mother was young. This was the time to tell her that her daughter was overwhelmed and scared. But those emotions paled next to the real one, the deciding one: she was ashamed. Ashamed that she gave them an imperfect grandchild. That another might be on the way. “Don’t Grieve for Us” was the title of an essay written by one autistic person, but how could you tell parents who still subscribed to the journals of a profession you no longer practiced that their grandchild might not be the big man on campus at Stanford, that, in fact, he might drink out of sippy cups and wear a diaper for the rest of his life? How could you bring to them the first real grief of their adult lives?
“The greatest blessing out of all this,” her mother said, “no prenup.”
&nb
sp; “Isn’t Shiva the greatest blessing out of all this?”
“Shiva’s not a blessing,” her mother said. “Shiva is the reason I live and breathe.”
* * *
—
SHE TOOK a long shower in a bathroom most people in her world, even Brooklyn Mina, would find tragic. The paint was flecking from the steam. There was a family-sized bottle of “Aromatherapy Stress Relief.” She would buy them a new house. Yes, that was the only way around this. She didn’t have the strength anymore to deal with the maintenance of her memories. She had always been drawn to Jewish boys because their culture also seemed deeply sentimental and revered the past. Maybe that had been a mistake. She imagined a handsome WASP family where all the victories and defeats of life were simply acknowledged and checked off without an emotional acid bath. Autistic child? “Oh, dear. Well, we’ll see you in the solarium for whist.” Maybe that’s why Barry was chasing down his Layla.
The sari she had worn in college still fit her, even with the baby bump. Well, that was pretty impressive. A small, disused shrine by the window elicited a fifth-grade memory. This little evangelical kid in class had gone on and on about church and how that’s where God lives, and Seema had said, “Our God lives with us at home.” And all the kids laughed at her, but then the teacher and her mother had organized a class trip to their house to visit their shrine. She made her first white friend that day, Sally Perkins with the missing back teeth. Such innocent times.
She looked up FiveThirtyEight on her phone. They were basically tied.
Every year for her birthday her grandparents would give her the biographies and memoirs of powerful people to encourage her, and they still lined the bookshelf of the bedroom she had shared with Shilpa. Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Indira Gandhi, Edward M. Kennedy, Michael J. Fox. There was a Recognition Award from something called the Center for Talent Development. Even Seema had forgotten what that was all about.
She put on the sari for dinner. She wanted to look beautiful for them.
Downstairs, the plates were left out and some inconsequential bottle of wine her mother had picked up with Seema in mind, since neither of her parents drank. Her mother was in the basement lovingly screaming in Tamil at one of her friends. The basement was a kind of five-hundred-square-foot all-purpose desi rec center where she let her friends hold pujas, where the first Ohioan Tamil to go to MIT could meet the first Keralan to go to CalTech. An entire dance troupe from Madras, or whatever they called it now, had camped there for a month when they were still in high school, driving everyone but her mother nuts with the whine of their tanpuras.
Why didn’t Shilpa e-mail back? Sometimes she envied her sister for becoming even more independent than she was. The girls had never been defiant toward their parents. Mom had been a nightmare, but not in the usual intergenerational immigrant sense. No whippings, no hair pulling, just steady emotional abuse of the caliber most of her Jewish friends endured. Her parents, arrived as late teenagers, were half immigrants at best. Their accents were slight. Their love of the Cavs complete. Sheltering Tamil dance troupes in the basement must have been an act of penance for all that assimilation.
Her father limped into the room. “Don’t you look lovely all dressed up,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“No way,” she said. “Not with your knee.”
“It’s good enough for a quick walk. I can hold your arm. We won’t do a twenty-in-twenty. We’ll do an eight-in-eight.”
This was their favorite thing to do on Sunday evenings all through her childhood, even when she came home from Ann Arbor. The “twenty-in-twenty” meant five blocks north, five blocks west, five blocks south, five blocks east, and they were home. The idea was to walk one block in one minute, so the whole thing would be just twenty minutes of father-daughter heaven, before it was time to go home and play a frenzied game of Monopoly with Shilpa and their mom, who always cheated and always won.
It was a brilliant evening. Canada geese were rooting around in the last of the sunlight. They walked past the houses of their neighbors, all those humble capes, though none as peeling and waterlogged as her parents’. Lots of Orthodox Jews were moving into the neighborhood. “Rebbe!” an old woman was shouting from a front porch. “Come back inside!” Their neighbor next door was a black handyman married to a Hungarian seamstress, if that was still a vocation, who gave her parents homemade sausages they would never eat. University Heights, as far as Seema was concerned, was as welcoming as America got.
Her father’s limp was brutal, but the weight of him against her was near perfect. She had to repress the desire to put her arms all the way around him, but if she did he would sense just how wretched her life had become. Any hug would be a cry for help.
The sun set, and a yellow moon emerged to greet them, father and daughter: she in a crisp beige sari and he, an older man in Western dress, limping along in his penny loafers. She was so much taller than he and her mother. How did genetics work like that? She touched the baby inside her. Someone had to help her through this mess, but who would it be? What if the right answer was “nobody”?
“Appa,” she said. “I think we should both go back to work.”
Her father laughed. “But I quit. You told me to quit. There are so many books I still have to read.”
“No,” she said. “You should go back to work. You were a great engineer. You can teach math to kids in East Cleveland. You’re such a good teacher. You’d inspire them!”
“I think it’s too late for that,” her father said.
“But otherwise what will you do? Stay in the house with amma?”
Her father looked at her. His eyes seemed clouded and tired. “If things really are over with Barry,” he said, “and I’m not your mother, so no pressure. But if your marriage is over, then maybe you could move back? It will be like the old times! We’ll have more dance troupes stay in the basement. Maybe a raga ensemble. Maybe Shiva can play with them. He hasn’t even been to a proper puja since he was born.” He checked Seema’s startled expression. “Of course, I am only kidding. No, stay where you are. You have a life.”
“Let’s go home,” she said, draping his arm around her shoulder.
“We’re halfway there,” her father said, brushing off her help. “Four more blocks.” A family of deer stood in the median of the road. According to her mom, neighboring Shaker Heights had a huge deer infestation. At least someone still wanted to live in greater Cleveland. The deer were all looking at her and her appa with curious fear, but they did not run off, as if they were proud to stand their ground. Maybe she wanted her family back, too. Or, better yet, maybe she wanted to build a family at last. Could she get services for Shiva here? Maybe the Cleveland Clinic had a program for autism. Her father was humming slokas again while shyly glancing her way. The bizarre love parents had for their children. Biological, spiritual, no explanation sufficed.
She had to tell them.
Back at the house, she let her parents eat first. No need to induce indigestion. Dinner was sacred. They sat beneath a tapestry of the goddess Lakshmi chilling atop a lotus leaf and an enlarged photo of Seema and Barry holding swaddled, purple-faced, just-born Shiva in the living room of Lenox Hill’s Beyoncé Suite. Her last meal on earth would have to include her mother’s sambar, that insane stew of okra and shallots and black-gram lentils and every spice from cinnamon to turmeric to fresh tamarind instead of the paste. Her mom actually sun-dried the chilies and soaked them in buttermilk, giving the dish a smoky spiciness Seema herself could never quite get right. She could never say no to large quantities of asafetida, a smelly taproot sap that added a complex leeklike flavor to her dishes. Cooking took hours and involved seemingly every implement ever devised, from tin bowls to pressure cookers to Vitamixes. There were two cupboards devoted solely to lentils. How did families without such food stay together? How could Whitman have claimed to contain “multitu
des” without ever having a South Indian meal?
They spoke little, concentrating on dipping dosas and idlis into the sambar. Both the dosas and the idlis were insane, too, perfectly sour with a pinch of fenugreek in the batter for extra flavor. Occasionally, her mother would say something cutting about her and Shilpa, while her father would extol the health benefits of Indian cooking, the way he would do with his white friends from work. “Did you know cinnamon prevents ulcers, and turmeric is capable of controlling Alzheimer’s disease? Proven facts.” His gentle nationalism.
“I have something to tell you,” Seema said, after the last of the dosas was crunched away.
“Here we go,” her mother said. “What did he do now? Probably has a mistress or is stealing from his investors. A complete and total pavaam,” meaning, roughly, “sad sack.”
“It’s about Shiva.”
Her father looked up at her. He had the same ears as in that photo from the 1970s. Those ears that stuck out like they belonged to a different, more innocent grade of human. Those soft, elongated ears. And the depth of his liquid eyes. And the crack of his knee. And the pressure of his tightened lips. And Seema realized.
Her father already knew.
HE LOVED Layla from the minute she opened the door. The moment he saw what she looked like now, he knew he had done the right thing. It was, for the first time in forever, a moment of victory. His P&L statements had finally turned green.
After the cab dropped him off in front of her house, a spacious ranch in what looked to be an affluent suburb, he dawdled in front of the garden beds with their yellowing desert plants overshadowed by a tall antique lamppost, gathering the courage to ring her bell.
This was it! This was Act 2! He had first seen Layla in the basement of the Tiger Inn, September 18, 1991. Every other girl there was dressed to impress, but she was wearing an oversize sweatshirt that read VCU. Later he learned that T-shirt had been a hand-me-up from her sister. Layla just did not give a fuck.
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